The European Commission has published its plans for implementing the UN's 2030 agenda and achieving the 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs).
The agenda, adopted last year by the international community, sets out a global framework to eradicate poverty and achieve sustainable development by 2030 and includes 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) and 169 associated targets.
Commission first vice-president Frans Timmermans said: ‘To build a future for our children and our planet to the benefit of everyone we are making the SDGs and sustainability a guiding principle in all our work. Implementing the UN 2030 agenda is a shared commitment and needs everyone's contribution and cooperation, including member states and civil society at large.’
The commission said it would use every instrument at its disposal, including regulation, to ensure that existing and new policies take into account the three pillars of sustainable development: social, environmental and economic.
It plans to launch a multi-stakeholder platform of public and the private sector organisation to develop best practice on SDG implementation, it said.
The proposals put forward by the commission include cross-cutting drivers of development, such as gender equality, sustainable energy and climate action, investment, migration and mobility.
WWF said that the package of proposals was ‘glossy, but incomplete’. In place of an overarching strategy, the commission had spun actions already underway in some sectors as sufficient, it said.
This piecemeal approach is not transformative as the SDGs require, and ignores the fact that sustainability concerns every area, and fails to consider how different policies impact one another or where the gaps are, said Geneviève Pons, director of WWF European Policy Office.
‘The 2030 global goals are indivisible and universal - not a series of separate boxes to tick or ignore,’ she said.
A Eurostat report published alongside the commission’s strategy outlines where the bloc currently stands on each of the goals. The commission will report back regularly on the EU's progress on implementing the agenda, starting in 2017.
